


Dal Niente

by YubiShines



Category: Homestuck
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-10-26
Updated: 2011-10-26
Packaged: 2017-10-24 23:54:39
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 422
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/269322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/YubiShines/pseuds/YubiShines
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A rioghail rises up. Follows 'Crescendo.'</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dal Niente

You are feeling perfectly fine.

You see, it isn’t you kneeling there on the gritty soil, while the sky shatters and dusk settles down like a smothering blanket. You aren’t seeing the utter wrongness of AR sprawled bonelessly on the ground and his head several feet away. It won’t be you who arranges their remains neatly, closing their eyes, placing their hands on their chest, you don’t move the questant so she’s lying next to her husband, and you don’t, finally, investigate what happened in the skyship base.

You aren’t the kind of person that has to deal with these things, so you aren’t. It’s as easy as that. You, that part of you has taken a smart step back, letting some other woman take control of your faculties, someone dispassionate and deliberate and with all the time in the world.

WV barely weighs of anything.

Serenity buzzes frantically, uselessly at you, and you are distantly grateful for evidence that something else out there (outside the strange, flat place that the inside of your head has become) is still alive, still capable of caring.

You cradle his head in your lap and you feel nothing at all.

Your mind is clearer than it has been for centuries.

For a moment, you see the city you tentatively dreamed about, when it was just the three of you around a fire and watching the stars come in. You see a town hall, made of bricks instead of books, with a light that might be seen for hundreds of miles, drawing other survivors to you. You see farms, roads, houses, shops, gardens.

You blink, and you’re kneeling on a metal floor with a cooling body on your lap.

You get to your feet.

You don’t cry. In some distant future, you’ll scream and beat at the walls until your hands smash into splinters and your throat is a ragged mess, but there’s no room for that right now.

You think, _I can’t, I won’t, don’t make me, is enough ever enough._

You think about monsters, and justice, and you think about duty.

You don’t think of anything but a vast echoing hush, the hush of cathedrals at night.

And the ring slips on your finger like it was made for you, and when the crackling roar of the Green Sun fills your ears and the anger you’ve hidden away for years finally rears its head and you see the naked shock on the Slayer’s face, it is almost a relief.

You are feeling perfectly fine.


End file.
